The Female Insight Zone is a series of 15-minute podcasts sharing insights from women who have made an indelible mark in business and the path they took to soar. Host Dr. Maribeth Kuzmeski, PhD, interviews inspiring female business leaders to reveal insights into successes, failures, and how they have overcome.

Tabitha Laser: Avoiding Organizational Culture Killers

Does the availability of big data truly give rise to better business decisions? Tabitha Laser argues that the answer is no. In fact, she believes that we get too focused on a single silo and make choices that increase risk in other areas. And this failure to learn is just one of the organizational culture killers that makes the modern workplace so dismal.

Tabitha Laser is the CEL of TA Laser Consulting, a firm that collaborates with business leaders and industry organizations to reduce risks, support cultural improvements, and maintain sustainable growth. She has worked to build and/or fix management systems for industry giants including Shell, BP, 3M and the US Department of Defense, among many others. Laser is sharing the lessons learned in her 25 years of operations and consulting experience in the new book series, Organizational Culture Killers: How Leaders Build Cultures of Success.

Today, Laser describes how seeing the same issues over and over in her work in management systems led to the creation of her book series. She explains how each volume serves as a guide to help the next generation of leaders avoid organizational culture killers, discussing how Deadly Expectations explores our failure to learn from past mistakes. Listen in for Laser’s insight on how extreme focus in a particular area can increase risk in others—and learn her system for making thoughtful, balanced business decisions.

Key Interview Takeaways

You don’t have to learn the hard way. Given the right mentorship, millennials can avoid the mistakes we made in the past. Laser’s book series serves as a toolbox to help people go into the workforce smarter and be successful sooner.The failure to learn is an organizational culture killer. With the advent of big data, we have so much information coming at us that we tend to make kneejerk decisions that are not thoughtful or balanced. And extreme focus in a single area increases risk in other areas we may not be aware of.Balanced decision-making involves considerations around people, the public and our performance. Rather than thinking on a scale of yes/no, making good choices requires that we explore how our decision will impact the workforce and our communities at large.

The concrete barrier between senior leadership and the workforce results in a failure to learn. Communication breaks down when team members are afraid to tell the truth or incentivized to lie in order to meet certain benchmarks.

To make positive change, you may have to rub people the wrong way. Laser knows that her book series will receive pushback from senior leaders who are set in their ways, but she is committed to building a positive future nonetheless.